A Kingston columnist calls Jamaica's market women uneconomic

A writer signing as H.P.J. published two columns in the Daily Gleaner in Kingston in June 1955. The first, on the eighth, said that proposals to change the marketing system came from harassed Marketing Department officials who were listening to small farmers whose system was collapsing, while consumers paid high prices that never improved the producer's lot. The second, on the twenty third, said that few higglers in any category made much money, and that their willingness to work for tiny margins had blocked the growth of greengrocers with telephones and delivery vans. The two charges pull against each other. In one the trader takes too much out of the chain. In the other she takes so little that no better paid trade can establish itself. Jamaica had no formal plan to abolish higglering at the time. The criticism came from middle class townspeople in conversation and in the press, some of whom also complained to visiting researchers about the rudeness of market women.

In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau formed the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale with nine other women: Georgette Justin, Maud Turian, Esther Dartigue, Alice Téligny Mathon, Marie Corvington, Olga Gordon, Fernande Bellegarde, Thérèse Hudicourt and Alice Garoute. They attacked gender inequality in Haitian politics directly and made suffrage the test of whether the country meant its own founding claims. Two decades of petitions, marches, essays and letters to legislators followed. In 1950 the Constitutional Congress amended Article 8 and granted women of twenty-one and over the right to vote in local and national elections. Haitian women cast ballots in a national election for the first time in 1957. The achievement belonged to a small professional class of women who kept insisting that the democratic promise of the first Black republic in the hemisphere was still outstanding. Their charge against the founders was specific. The men who won independence at the end of the eighteenth century wrote women out of full citizenship, and nobody corrected it for a hundred and forty-six years.

The Haitian communities abroad that now send money home began as an escape. Through the 1960s educated Haitians left in numbers as Francois Duvalier fastened his grip, and the Haitian population of the United States grew from about five thousand in 1960 to about thirty thousand in 1970. The people who went were the ones a poor country can least spare: lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, civil servants and owners of businesses. Schools and hospitals lost the staff who ran them and the state lost the people who knew how to make it work. The movement never stopped. By the early twenty first century more than 2.5 million Haitians lived outside Haiti, roughly a million in the Dominican Republic and roughly a million in the United States, about three hundred thousand in Cuba, and close to a hundred thousand each in the Bahamas, Canada and France. Money sent back by those households became one of the largest sources of income in the Haitian economy.

Twenty nine Asian and African countries took part in the Bandung Conference of 1955. The word decolonisation acquired its modern meaning there, as a third option alongside capitalism and communism, at a moment when the Cold War was pressing every new state to choose one of the two. The first meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries followed in 1961. Non-alignment was itself a statement that the choice on offer was not the only one available. Bandung allowed Islamic and Indian arguments to be linked with the struggles in Africa and Asia, and it gave a vocabulary to people who wanted independence without simply changing patrons. In the early nineteenth century the words used for the same ends had been independence and revolution, as in the American and Haitian revolutions and the Mexican and Argentine independences. Haiti had made the case a hundred and fifty years before there was a conference at which to make it.